"You've got a friend in me": Co-Designing a Peer Social Robot for Young Newcomers' Language and Cultural Learning

TL;DR

This study presents Maple, a peer-like social robot designed to support language and cultural learning for young newcomers through co-designed story activities and tutor-in-the-loop features.

Contribution

It introduces a novel co-designed SAR prototype tailored for community settings to enhance language socialization among young newcomers.

Findings

Derived newcomer-specific requirements from co-design sessions.

Developed an integrated prototype with story activities, scaffolding, and quizzes.

Outlined design implications and future evaluation directions.

Abstract

Community literacy programs supporting young newcomer children in Canada face limited staffing and scarce one-to-one time, which constrains personalized English and cultural learning support. This paper reports on a co-design study with United for Literacy tutors that informed Maple, a table-top, peer-like Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) designed as a practice partner within tutor-mediated sessions. From shadowing and co-design interviews, we derived newcomer-specific requirements and added them in an integrated prototype that uses short story-based activities, multi-modal scaffolding and embedded quizzes that support attention while producing tutor-actionable formative signals. We contribute system design implications for tutor-in-the-loop SARs supporting language socialization in community settings and outline directions for child-centered evaluation in authentic programs.